A data warehouse is a repository of an organization's information that also provides facilities to allow a data analyst to perform complex queries and analysis (e.g., data mining) on the information. Conventional data warehouses often include a single relational database management system (RDBMS), including various add-on tools and data warehouse-specific optimizations. A deficiency of such conventional technologies is that they use a single underlying system for acquisition, storage and retrieval of both fact and dimension data. The different characteristics of these data types means that a system optimized to handle one data type efficiently will generally not handle the other data type efficiently, particularly at large scale. For example, many conventional data warehouses use an ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability)-compliant transactional RDBMS for storage and data management. Such a conventional system, however, is typically unnecessary for fact data, and imposes a performance penalty as fact data streams into the system.